Salvador Dalí was born in  1904. His family lived in the Catalan town of Figueres, Spain, but spent the summers in the seaside village of Cadaqués.

At Cadaqués, Dalí studied painting with a family friend, Ramón Pichot, an artist who painted mostly in the style of the Impressionists, but also experimented with some styles of the Catalan avant-garde. Pichot, who lived in Paris and was friends with other artists including Pablo Picasso, was a mentor to Dalí throughout his youth, and was eventually successful in persuading Dalí’s reluctant father to allow his son to apply for admission at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid.

During these years Dalí experimented with several avant-garde painting styles, primarily Cubism, Futurism and Purism, which he learned about through reproductions in art journals.

In 1929, Dalí partnered with his friend, Luis Buñuel, to create a short avant-garde film titled Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) consisting of a series of short scenes of unexplained violence and rotting corpses. The widespread acclaim for the film among the European avant-garde elevated the two to international fame and brought Dali to Paris. In particular, the Surrealists took notice of Dalí and Buñuel, welcoming them to their artistic circle. By 1939 Dalí broke from the Surrealists. Dalí’s departure from the Surrealists marked the end of his affiliation with artistic groups and movements. Through the rest of his life he remained independent as an artist, working in his own style and exploring his own introspective and paranoic avenues.

During the war Dalí  became well known by the American public, and very popular with American collectors as well. During the course of the decade Dalí’s works were exhibited in important galleries in New York and in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He also lent his talent to other media, collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney on film and animation projects.

In the final decades of his life, Dalí painted less and less. He remained an international celebrity, with major exhibitions of his works in cities around the world including Tokyo, London, Paris, Ferrara (Italy) and Moscow. Before his death on January 23, 1989, Dalí even witnessed the inauguration of two museums dedicated to exhibiting his art, The Salvador Dalí Museum in Cleveland, Ohio (now in St. Petersburg, Florida) and his own Teatre-Museu in Figureres, where he is buried.